The Whore From District Four
by katrinawritesstuff
Summary: The intro to a story which looks at the politics of sex work in the Capitol & the Districts. This chapter is just an excerpt from Katniss and Peeta's book. The story will eventually revolve around Fannie Finnick & Annie, ha ha .
1. Chapter 1

"**The Whore From District Four"**

_The following excerpt is from Panem's Dark Years: A Sardonic Guided Tour, by authors Everdeen, K., and Mellark, P., and appeared in The Capitol Humanist magazine._

Any visitor to the great nation of Panem (which tourists from The Country Formerly Known As Australia [1] charmingly and somewhat-aptly mispronounce as "Pain 'Em") will note that our republic is divided into 12 distinct yet equally important districts. The high level of social stability in Panem is maintained through rigorous scheduling and micro-managing, and specialisation. This latter attribute refers to industry; specifically, to each District's provision of goods and services to citizens of the Capitol as well as to its own residents (although mostly to Capitol citizens. Ssh! You didn't hear this from us!) Hence the Capitol's beloved mantra: "Productivity Equals Prosperity." In later years, this slogan morphed into the seemingly-innocuous, "Productivity Equals Peace", though any District-dweller could hardly fail to notice the implied threat (note that we are not suggesting _at all _that the Capitol would harm the populace in the Districts. Oh, perish the thought! The Capitol simply _adores_ residents of its Twelve Districts; especially their children!)

To return to the subject of specialisation, though: As we were saying, each District is responsible for a particular industry. A District has complete dominion over its given industry, and is entirely responsible for producing the associated goods and services that will ensure a happy and docile Capitol populace (a recipe hinted at by our nation's name, _Panem et circuses_). The images on our various coats of arms demonstrate which industry each of the 12 districts is responsible for. If you, Dear Tourist, have not had the pleasure of witnessing any of our coats of arms yet (well, firstly, you should rectify this situation immediately—oppression has never looked so shiny!), then—_behold!_—let us introduce to you the glorious nation of the U.D.P (United Districts of Panem): Land of Liberty, Land of The Free. So, without further ado, we present to you the Twelve Districts and their respective industries:

**District One:** Luxury Items.

**District Two:** Mining & Stonecutting (we don't care what you've heard about it, this district has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Military & Defence, so just let the matter rest!)

**District Three:** Telecommunications, Computers and Electronics.

**District Four:** Fisheries & Waterworks.

**District Five:** Electricity.

**District Six:** Transportation.

**District Seven:** Timber & Publishing (Our friend Johanna Mason would like to add: "Yes, PUBLISHING. Don't look so shocked, People From Other Districts! Where the hell do you think books come from? Did it ever occur to you to wonder why, in the 67th Hunger Games, our tributes came dressed as works of classical literature? Unfortunately, no-one but Seveners got the joke, and we've been coming as trees again ever since. The aristocrats laughed at us-'Can't spell happiness without 'pine', hur hur!'—brainless Capitol twats!") Um, okay. Thanks Johanna. Moving along...

**District Eight:** Clothing & Textiles (again, we don't care what you've heard—there's no illegal dynamite production going on in this District, and the only fireworks they make are used strictly for official celebrations!)

**District Nine:** Apiaries (Bee farming. Nine also once specialised in Grain Production, until this industry was usurped by Eleven. But, never mind—the Capitol needs its honey! Nine also developed a somewhat-unearned reputation for insolence after Caesar Flickerman once asked a couple of tributes who complained about their bee costumes what they'd like to come as instead, and the pair replied, "Insulin needles!" Needless to say, District Nine has since fallen out of favour with Capitol sponsors).

**District Ten:** Poultry, Livestock & Dairy.

**District Eleven:** Agriculture.

**District Twelve:** Coal Production.

So there you have it, Dear Tourist! A brief field guide to the 12 districts of Panem. (Do not ask about District Thirteen. THERE IS NO DISTRICT THIRTEEN, and you mustn't let any of those fanciful stories told to you by District Eight dreamers convince you otherwise. Though if you _must_ know, when it still existed its specialty was graphite mining. NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS, DO NOT LISTEN TO THE DISTRICT EIGHT FOLK, THEY ARE FILTHY LIARS.)

One more thing...

The Most Frequently Asked Question by tourists visiting our fine nation (after, "Which District is responsible for Waste Management? Like, where are your shit farms?" [2]) is always, "So—who takes care of the Capitol's more, uh, _carnal_ urges?" Well, we're so glad you asked! For visitors are sometimes under the mistaken impression that Capitol folk, painted and plucked to within an inch of their enviable life spans, are somehow divested of this most basic of human urges. Not so, Dear Tourist! For you see, every society's underclass gets screwed by its elites, some metaphorically, some literally. But when you come down to it, we are screwed all the same.

However, it is the latter kind of screwing to which our next chapter will be devoted. Capitol folk are a fickle lot, sometimes. Trends come and go; gaudy outfits fall in and out of fashion. But, Dear Tourist, remember this: as real estate prices rise and hemlines fall, _fucking_ remains _ever_ in their favour.

* * *

Footnotes:

[1] Occupied by China since 2045.

[2] District 12,_ obviously._


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

Finnick was tired. Sometimes providing relief for society's sexually undernourished masses could take a lot out of a man.

At night in his bed, Finnick's body now belonged to him and him alone. When he first began his career as a Rent Boy, he'd relished the feeling of coming home to his apartment after a long day's work, taking a hot shower and washing off the scent of clients whose woe continued to linger under his skin long after he'd punched the clock, like a houseguest who overstayed his welcome. Their smell. Their sadness. Back in those days he exfoliated his skin with an outsized loofah 'til it bled heavily, the diseased redness mixing in with the shower water as it gurgled and swirled down the drain. In trying to erase them, he gradually began instead to erase himself—as the wounds on his skin ruptured open, so too did Finnick. To everyone and everything. Every experience, no matter how fucked up: booze, hallucinogens, Morphling. Even fucking prescription meds. His boundaries and sense of normalcy were distorted, shot through a fish-eye lens.

Back then, all he wanted was to be left alone. Now he couldn't stand it. The apartment bed was no longer a refuge but a prison. He hated being in his own skin. He felt more comfortable in someone else's.

As he laid there in his bed, Finnick performed a mental inventory of the pros and cons of his job.

The money sucked. In recent years, Panem had fallen on hard times—widespread unemployment in the Capitol meant abject poverty in the Districts, and blowjobs were going at the rate of a sack of gummy worms from the Drugstore. Anal was more lucrative, fetching around fifty bucks a pop at the starting rate. The reason for this was that the clients—peace-keepers, mostly—didn't like to use protection, claiming it anesthetised their cocks. Hailing from the Capitol, many were unaware of the horrific extent of the S.D. ("Slow Death") Virus, which filled the void AIDS had left behind after its cure several decades earlier—a new disease on the scene, S.D. spread the way most cancers did, starting at one organ before gradually metastasizing to others, 'til it slowly and painfully shut the person's body down completely. The virus was transmitted sexually, with anal intercourse carrying a greater risk of infection. Since peace-keepers were damn nigh impossible to reason with, and since District whores needed to eat, even in this woe-begotten economic climate, anal could still fetch you a few bucks for your bang. Hey, if you were gonna die anyway, you might as well live the high life a bit before ya kicked it.

There were a few special interest groups—"People Rebuking & Undermining District Exploitation" was the main one, though Finnick preferred to think of them as "busy-body people with too much time on their hands"—who used District whores as Exhibit A in their imagined class war between the Districts and the Capitol. The standard line went something like: "District whores are the most tragic example of proletarian exploitation by the ruling class there is, and must be held up as such at every opportunity. Therefore, all District whores must burst their false consciousness bubble immediately, stop what they are doing and rise up with their comrades in a full-blown class war against the Capitol." Um, yeaaah. The sheer impracticality of the proposed solution was laughable (okay, class war, cool, but how the fuck do we eat in the meantime? How was it that people who consumed utopian ideals alone produced more shit than folks who ate actual food?) Besides, why were District whores any more exploited than District kitchen-hands, or fish mongers, or plumbers? Why were whores the only group required to renounce their livelihood for the Greater Cause of "liberating" their self-anointed saviours from a mental prison of said saviours' own making? Finnick wanted to tell them that they could channel their neuroses into a class war all they liked, but please leave the whores out of it. He _wanted_ to, but of course he never did. He was too polite; it wasn't in his nature. He preferred to help maintain peoples' illusions about themselves, not shatter them. He was in the right business.

He could do without the stigma too, he supposed. Actually, fuck it, that was half the problem right there—District hookers got no respect. Sure, roughness was an expected part of the job, but peace-keeper clients were fucking brutal. They treated whores as beneath contempt. Some looked like they wanted to spit on you; others just looked ashamed, like it was so fucking terrible that they had to descend to fucking a lowly Rent Boy. For more than a few, a whore's worth began and ended with his cock or asshole. It wasn't like that in the Capitol, where hooking ("sex work", they called it) was perfectly legal. Clients there respected a whore—when they paid for your services they were extravagant, paying obscene amounts of cash for the privilege, some even showering you with lavish gifts (or so he'd heard). They were kind. When they screwed you, they were almost affectionate.

Of course, that was only how they treated Capitol hookers. It was a different story when they paid a visit to whores in the Districts.

Anyway, maybe tenderness and affection were overrated. The greatest fuck Finnick had ever had was a Peace-keeper who screwed him hard and dirty. A towering slab of six-foot-seven beefcake, shaved head, tattooed, all muscle and sinew, all braun and no brain, the man had nonetheless respected Finnick as a person, and said beforehand that he found what Finnick did for a living "honourable" and "noble." Regardless, when it was time to throw down they went hard, the larger man pounding away at the much smaller man beneath him as though he intended to split him in two. Pain and arousal had mingled in Finnick's body, the latter intensifying as the client had reached around his front and ran his large lube-slicked hand up and down Finnick's cock. Finnick had come louder and harder than he ever had before in his life. The borderline violent intensity of desire—his clients, his own—was a part of the job that would always take him by surprise, and never quite went away.

He still preferred blow-jobs to anal, though. He felt he was better at giving head—he loved running his tongue up the underside of a client's shaft agonisingly slowly, bringing them to a gradual but intense climax. He was good at using his hands as a mouth-proxy for clients with exceptionally big cocks, too, placing his hand at the base and then taking as much of their length into his mouth as possible. The low moans of gratitude he heard when they orgasmed made him flush with pride, and were proof of a job well done.

So not all clients were bad. There were a few decent ones. Many were just lonely and horny. And he received a few orgasms along with his bruises, so he couldn't really complain too much.

Some people thought the worst part of the job was the possibility of being raped, and they were probably right. An already under-reported crime in the Districts, it was far worse for a whore. The best chance you had was if a Capitol client revealed to you he was a spy who was wanted for treason. That way, if he tried to take you against your will or abscond without paying you, you could rat him out to the authorities. It happened with astonishing frequency, given the amusing tendency of some folks to treat hookers as surrogate therapists. Finnick actually had this very experience happen to him, but couldn't bring himself to report the asshole—he'd never been big on eye-for-an-eye justice. Besides, the Capitol treated a traitor far worse than almost anyone treated a whore.

A bad part of the job that few people who weren't whores realised wasn't the clients' cruelty, but their sadness. How this weekly visit was the one thing in their lives these people had left to hang on to. How they told horrifying stories of murdered wives, of children blown up right before their eyes. These were things you could never un-hear. Finnick had been sexually assaulted on a few occasions, and while the experience had been a traumatic one, he privately wondered which was worse.

He saw more male than female clients. In general, the female clients were more grateful, and more cautious, than the men. This was to be expected—male Peace-keepers, young guys, military men—they were mostly unencumbered by wives or children, or, if they had a family, chose to behave as though they were single. Many of the women had husbands or boyfriends who had migrated to another District for work, or were single mothers whose partners had been killed in a bloody battle with the peace-keepers. Having dependent children meant that they were more wary of exposing themselves to an S.D. infection with a bisexual Rent Boy, and so mostly sought out the straight ones (no sexual orientation was stigmatised, as in The Old World of the early twenty-first century—it was simply an unfortunate truth that infection rates were higher among bi Rent Boys than among those who limited their client base). But otherwise, their basic needs were the same—they wanted to come. And to feel desirable and wanted and sexy. They wanted something bright and beautiful to bring colour to their bleak, grey lives.

Finnick remembered two of these women in particular.

The first was a heavily-pregnant North Francophone Panemian woman with a raucous laugh, whose smooth caramel-coloured skin could be credited to her half-Native ancestry. Her breasts were enormous, the areolas dark and prominent, unapologetically sexual. Her body was fleshy and womanly, her labia wonderfully fat and fuckable, not at all like the sterile, polite little camel toes in the porno magazines. And her cunt was wet well before Finnick buried his head between her thighs, too. Despite being pregnant, this woman had zero reservations about proceeding gently "for the baby." On the contrary—she ordered him to fuck her hard and fast from behind, telling him to give her hair a bit of a pull for good measure. She pulled his hair too, when he went down on her before they fucked. They'd also done it with her on top, and she ordered him to give her a sleazy look while grabbing her breasts, which he loved, although he hadn't been crazy about the slap to the face he received each time he obliged (she'd sworn at him too, which had been a turn-on).

In the post-coital warmth that followed, the woman had explained that her husband had transferred to another District and was seldom home, and she needed a bit of attention and excitement in his absence. She was unashamed of seeing a whore, although she did apologise profusely for her laugh, which seemed to embarrass her. Finnick told her he loved her laugh and meant it; he always had a special spot in his heart for clients who loved to fuck and weren't afraid to let you know it.

Then, of course, was the love of his life. Annie Cresta.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

"Annie Cresta. Auburn hair, azure eyes. Button nose that was slightly upturned. Aura of innocence that belied all she'd seen, all she'd known. That curious kitten act didn't fool me one bit. She was a wildcat, that Annie. But I saw through her. Oh, yes." Cinna gingerly removed the fat cigar from his mouth and exhaled forcefully, expelling twin cauliflower whorls of smoke into the winter air.

From the two armchairs where he and Katniss sat facing one another in front of the fireplace, Cinna drolly observed the stark contrast in their demeanours. He was comfortable, at ease, relaxed to the point of sedation; Katniss, conversely, appeared fidgety and agitated. Her brow was furrowed, the two bushy black lines converging into an angry 'V.' What the lady had to be pissed about was anyone's guess. Wasn't he giving her all the juicy information she hankered after, all the real meaty stuff she could slap on the bare bones of that book she was writing with her Mister? Still, Cinna _did_ have a tendency to digress, he supposed. And irritation and concentration were an easily confused pair. Maybe he was projecting. Lord knew talk of Annie made him feel the way Katniss looked.

"Well?"

She was looking at him expectantly, perched on the edge of the chair with the pen she was holding poised and ready above her notepad, regarding him as if he were a magic goose and she was waiting for the golden egg to emerge from his rear. Cinna could sense that she wanted something from him, but wasn't quite sure _what._ His mind strained to produce something of value, but it was no use. The farmer was going to be disappointed today.

Cinna gave her a confused look. "Well what?"

Her face fell. Katniss dropped the pen and notepad into her lap, sighing as she leaned back in the armchair. With a weariness that struck Cinna as exaggerated, she closed her eyes and massaged her temples in exasperation.

_"Annie,_ Cin. Remember? We were just talking about her. You were about to tell me how she met Finnick?"

"Oh. Right. _That,"_ he mumbled ruefully, stubbing out what remained of the cigar in the ashtray on the arm of his chair. When he glanced up, he noticed that Katniss's formerly-irritated expression had coalesced into one of sympathy, of pity. The worst thing about being old, Cinna reflected, wasn't really weakness per se, but a lack of ability to conceal it from others. Your deficiencies were exposed to the world like an untreated wound, and multiplied accordingly.

"Finnick was an orphan," Cinna ventured slowly. "All through his young life, he bounced from one foster home to the next like a ping-pong ball." He paused, realising he missed the reassuring weight of the cigar between his fingers. Never mind. The words were coming easier now.

"At fourteen, his foster family treated him so bad that he just up and flew the coop one day. Can't say I blame him, what with all the evil things those assholes did to him."

"What kind of things?"

Cinna gave her a look of bittersweet bemusement. It was strange how after all these years, after all she'd been through, Katniss still possessed a kind of pure, unblemished innocence that all the horrors in the world seemed unable to tarnish. A childlike faith in humankind's innate goodness, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. As a forty-year-old and a Hunger Games veteran (as all former victors were now called), it was remarkable that Katniss Everdeen was still able to treat human failings with compassion rather than condemnation, regard peoples' quirks with curiosity rather than paranoid suspicion. More cynical souls (who readily defaulted to the latter) would sneer at this one's apparent lack of worldliness. Cinna didn't sneer. Actually, he found it enviable.

Cinna hesitated. But Katniss was giving him a hard look that said, _Go on, lay it on me straight, I can handle it_, and so he continued.

"Abuse...sexual."

"Oh." Her expression was sad but unsurprised, like she'd been expecting that answer but was hoping to be proven wrong. He sometimes forgot that Katniss, naive as she might seem at times, was now an adult.

"Anyway," Cinna continued, "As you can imagine, a homeless boy of fourteen who'd dropped out of school didn't have very good employment prospects. At first he got by through begging; then through pick-pocketing. But this was subsistence living—getting by on meagre scraps, existing on the half-empty takeout boxes and out-of-date foodstuffs he found in dumpsters. Soon the boy became emaciated, with pronounced xylophone ribs and a spine like a string of pearls. He needed a more substantial form of income.

"And so he did what all the other urchin boys his age did—sold his body on the streets. His clientele were mostly older teenagers at first, but even at that tender age, he still got the odd Peacekeeper here and there." Cinna shook his head in disgust. "Not right, I know; why I've always hated the Capitol, even when I was their servant. Nothing was right, in that world."

Katniss was silent as she listened, her thoughts hidden behind a mask of inscrutability. Cinna went on.

"As a teenager, Finnick took many foolish risks. He never used protection; he screwed his clients in alleyways and in plain view of thugs and cops; and he never refused anyone who asked him. _Ever_. Even the ones who looked violent and menacing. Even the ones who _told him_ they were diseased." Cinna stared at his hands. He didn't feel judgemental about any of this, like he did back when Finnick had told him all those years ago. With hindsight, he knew Finnick's lack of a preservation instinct was natural given his feelings of worthlessness. Without self-love, we self-destruct. The latter option was easier, for some. It took less work.

"Well, I met that boy when he was no longer a boy—eighteen years old, in fact. I was thirty and living in my own kind of hell—a sham marriage to a woman I wasn't attracted to." He smiled sadly. He hadn't meant to say this much.

Katniss bit down on the end of her pen and gave him a quizzical look. "Who was that? Portia?"

Cinna laughed. "Oh, no, no! This was years before Portia. This woman was called Vila. I was working behind the counter at my father's bar in District Four at the time. The bar was called Neptune's. I don't know if you used to have anything like it in Twelve—"

"We did," Katniss nodded, "The Seam."

"Oh, okay. Anyway, I was living and working in Four, where I grew up and had lived all my life—this was a couple of years before I got a Scholarship to study Fashion Design in the Capitol—but before that lucky break, I was pretty much just passing the days working in my father's bar. I'd just married this nice girl, and although my life was going well, things were kind of ho-hum. Then ho-hum became dull and dull became downright depressing, and before I knew it, I had taken to shooting up Morphling." He smiled wryly.

"I should never have married Vila, but I was pushing thirty and my parents wanted me to settle down. I was seeing someone else at the time as well, a man, but my folks told me I would remain a bachelor forever if I didn't marry one of them soon. So I chose her."

"This man you were seeing. Was he...?"

"Yes. Working-class. My family was upper-middleclass. The stigma in marrying a man of such limited means would've been too great."

"Aah." Katniss looked thoughtful. "It's sad, you know," she mused, "that even in this day and age, in a time when all Panemians are supposedly equal, that poor people are still regarded as second-class citizens. I mean, in some Districts, it's still illegal for them to marry 'above their standing!' It's pathetic! What do people think this _is,_ the 2050s?"

Katniss was sermonising, but her righteousness didn't bother Cinna the way others' did. Yeah, it was a little bumper sticker-y, but he knew she was being sincere. She was showing her Crusading Reporter On A Mission side again. Always blazing a trail on behalf of the downtrodden and the oppressed. They were right to call her "the girl on fire." Time hadn't extinguished her flame.

"I know. It sucks. But that's the world we've inherited, I guess." He frowned. "What was I talking about, again?"

"Your life in Four, just as you were about to meet Finnick."

"That's right. Well, as I was saying, my marriage was a complete sham. The sex Vila and I had was rare and boring—my fault, not hers. Around three times a month. Terrible. I honestly just felt as though I was doing my husbandly duties. When Vila tried to spice things up with toys and acrobatic positions—"

"WHOA." Katniss' eyes widened as she held up both hands and shook her head firmly. "I do _not_ need to hear this, Cin. It's TMI. _Way_ TMI. Could we maybe skip that part?"

Cinna stifled a grin. _Young people_. So easily repulsed by the idea that elderly folk had once made love. Or fucked, which was a more accurate term for the kind of sex Cinna had enjoyed in his youth.

His lips curled upwards slightly. "'Kay," he said teasingly, "but I should warn you, it doesn't get much cleaner from here!"

Katniss smiled and rolled her eyes.

"I met Finnick when he was working at a local D4 brothel—" Katniss looked alarmed, so Cinna quickly added, "I _won't_ discuss the sex, okay?" This seemed to placate her, so he continued. "Anyway. How can I describe it? Meeting Finnick was like..." he paused, his eyes taking on a far-off, dreamy filter. "...like being stuck in a desert for what seems like an eternity. So long, you think you're going to die. Then, all of sudden, you see it—a lovely, cool oasis. Finally, after so, so long, you quench your insatiable thirst. And you're alive."

Cinna closed his eyes. He still recalled their encounter so vividly in his mind.

When he had opened the door to the brothel suite he'd been allocated, Finnick was lying there on the bed propped up on his elbows. He'd wiggled his eyebrows slyly and given Cinna a big shit-eating grin.

"My, aren't _you_ a sharply-dressed gent," he'd remarked impishly, eyes flicking up and down Cinna's body appraisingly. God, he'd always seemed like such a cocky bastard, so arrogant and sure of himself. And it was a total facade. Odair was in fact the most self-effacing, sweet-natured guy you could hope to meet, when he wasn't trying to live up to the egotistical, love-'em- and-leave-'em lothario image that had almost been forced upon him (an image contrived well before he'd even entered the Hunger Games).

"Thanks," Cinna had muttered shyly, averting his eyes as he scratched the back of his neck uncomfortably. This felt all wrong. Going in, Cinna had felt cool and confident. Now he felt like some loser schoolkid. But _he_ was the client—wasn't he supposed to be the powerful one? Cinna certainly didn't feel powerful. In fact, he felt nervous and exposed. He was fully clothed, but he may well have been buck-naked. Finnick's eyes seemed to bore right though his clothes anyway.

_Fuck._ Was he really going to be naked in front of this kid? And 'kid' was probably the right word—how old was this guy, anyway? He didn't look a day over eighteen. Taking in Finnick's lithe bod and surprisingly sculpted six-pack, Cinna suddenly experienced an acute sense of guilt over his own flabby, neglected physique. He wished he'd worked out more.

Finnick patted the bed and smiled. "So," he said coyly, and made a sweeping gesture down his torso, "All yours, bud. Wherever you wanna put it."

Observing the sight of Finnick lying invitingly on the bed—lightly muscled, vaguely androgynous in facial features but unequivocally masculine where it counted, youthful but not a twink, clad in nothing but a plain black thong and a smile, Cinna suddenly remembered what he'd come here for.

He removed his shirt and jacket and kneeled in front of Finnick on the bed, hesitant at first. "Um, I'd like you to, I don't know...maybe blow me first?" _Smooth._

Finnick looked delighted. "Great choice," he purred, and eagerly began to unbuckle Cinna's belt. Cinna thought he must've looked nervous, because Finnick grinned and added, "Hey, you need to relax a bit, man. Chill. Trust me, you got nothing to worry about; I give _incredible_ head."

Boy, did he ever. The second Finnick's warm mouth enclosed snugly around Cinna's cock, the older man felt as though he was going to blow his stack. His cock went rock-hard the instant Fin's lips touched it, and as the whore's tongue ascended slowly up the underside of the shaft and flicked impishly over the head, Cinna's mind feverishly conjured images of landfills, waste treatment facilities, naked parents—anything he could think of to keep from coming too soon.

At one critical juncture, Finnick, who'd maintained sly eye contact throughout, paused and said, "You know, this is nice and all, but I could go in for something a bit rougher. You can pull my hair, you know. Buck your hips a little. Face-fuck me, if you'd like."

Shocked, Cinna was about to protest, tell Finnick not to be so ridiculous, but something stopped him. Maybe it was all those years of pent-up sexual aggression that had been bottled up inside him for so long, but whatever it was, it exploded the polite, perfect facade of sexless gentlemanliness Cinna donned in the day-to-day until only filthy tatters remained.

Cinna bucked his hips. Harder. He yanked Finnick's head back and forth by his long, flowing blonde curls, buttocks clenching as he thrust his cock into the whore's mouth, repeatedly and with increasing aggression. The noises of pleasure and discomfort, or pain, _fuck yes, PAIN,_ brought him closer to orgasm with each violent thrust. _This_ was what it meant to fuck someone. This was what it felt like to be _alive._

When Cinna finally came, moaning his release as he emptied his load down Finnick's throat, the whore accepted the gift with an equanimity that bordered on the saintly. Actually, there was a saint-like quality about Finnick in general, something that would become more apparent with each subsequent visit and over the course of their friendship. The way he so readily over-looked peoples' flaws, not just their physical ones (Cinna's slight gut; the scar from a tattoo he'd tried to self-remove on his inner thigh; a small cluster of haemorrhoids) but also their emotional ones (Cinna's complete concealment of his true feelings behind a mask of friendly interest; his aloof haughtiness when insulted; the uncharacteristic bitterness and vitriol that poured out whenever someone mentioned his family). Finnick didn't merely ignore these things, though. He may've let the physical anomalies pass by without comment, but he was intensely interested in others' emotional defects. After they got to know one another better, having deep conversations about traumatic events from his past would prove deeply cathartic for Cinna. This was a crude analogy, but it was like getting someone to squeeze a blackhead for you. Disgusting and humiliating as it might be, you still felt relieved and grateful when all that nasty gunk exploded to the surface.

Cinna was thankful for the time he and Finnick had spent together, unfortunately-brief though it was. Still, things didn't have to last forever for them to be profound, for them to be worthwhile, for them to be of value. Cinna cherished the brief window of time he and Finnick had enjoyed in each other's company, a window through which a happier, brighter world had, for a short time at least, seemed possible. A world that even that numbskull Annie Cresta—with her stupid, coquettish laugh, her self-declared "free-spiritedness" and air-headed gypsy bullshit, her casual panty-flashing exhibitionism and the exotic dancing she did that rendered Finnick drooling, slack-jawed and dumb—couldn't get her wily hands on. Thinking of Annie, Cinna felt his face twist into a sneer as Envy, his old drinking companion, made an unwelcome re-appearance.

There was a palpable energy enveloping Cinna's body. Snapping out of it, Cinna suddenly realised the energy was emanating from Katniss, who had been staring at him, silently waiting for him to continue. Fuck, not again. He didn't feel like he was able to do this anymore. He hated being old. He hated being a disappointment to people he cared about.

"Sorry," he smiled weakly. "I...I don't think I can go on. I'm really sorry, Katniss. I just...can't do this right now." He laughed and shook his head apologetically. "Sorry I've failed you, K."

Katniss regarded him tenderly. "You didn't fail me," she said gently. "And that's alright. We can continue this later."


End file.
